How to Feel More Connected When Your Entire Team Is Working Remotely
If you work in a remote team, one aspect that you quickly notice is the importance of communication. When you are not working face-to-face, you need to find the best ways to communicate with your team because you are missing out on most – if not all – of the context of each person’s situation.
This post originally appeared on the Zapier blog .
For example, if you are in the office with your teammates, you will notice that someone is especially quiet and withdrawn. And if this is a common pattern, you will know that this is a hint that they did not sleep well last night and need a little space, or that they are especially stressed and may use chat to share their concerns.
You will also notice details such as the noise level in the office or the distracting noise from roadworks outside. You can tell when someone is really focused on their work and when they might be distracted.
As humans, we are great at picking up on these signals. We practice this every day in our communication and use people’s body language and tone of voice to inform how we communicate with them.
But on a remote command, you lose most of that context, so you need to find ways to fix it . Let’s take a look at a few ways to forge strong bonds with teammates when they are away.
Establishing mutual understanding remotely
When you start a new job on a remote team, this can seem very odd. While this may be less frustrating than working in a new office full of people you don’t know, it can also be more isolating since you don’t have an easy way to quickly get to know everyone, especially those you don’t know. work directly.
In the end, you’ll get by and chat with everyone and maybe even meet them in person at a corporate event that Zapier hosts every few months. But how do you go about forging relationships with people you’ve never really met?
Let’s start with some common methods of building rapport and see how we can apply them to a remote work situation.
Robin Drik is a Lead Instructor at the FBI Counterintelligence Training Center and author of It’s Not All About Me: Ten Methods for Getting Fast With Anyone . In his book, Drik explains some of the easiest ways to build rapport with others, including smiling, dropping your chin down so you don’t look at them, matching the strength of their handshake, and slowing down your speech so you give the impression of being more reliable.
All good advice, but not very useful in a remote environment. So what can we apply to a remote situation to help us build strong relationships with our teammates? Well, there are a few things that Drik suggests that we can use.
First, Drick notes that meeting someone new can be overwhelming if you don’t have time constraints to talk. Because we are programmed to look for threats in any new situation, our first reaction to meeting someone is to fear them until we start building rapport. Creating an artificial time limit can help reduce the stress of talking to a new person, Drick said.
If you’re setting up phone or video calls to meet your new teammates, try setting a time limit of 15 minutes.
Another tip from Drick is to validate others by listening to them and suppressing your ego. “True testing, coupled with ego detachment, means you have nothing to say, that you are here just to hear them,” he writes.
We love talking about ourselves , especially with good listeners, but this means that we are often ready to respond with our own stories when the other person finishes speaking. Drick says ego suppression means giving up your own desires to participate in the conversation and instead asking short, open-ended questions such as how, when, and why .
Research has shown that listening carefully and asking the person you are talking to to elaborate on what they are saying will make you prettier and more likely to be selected for future conversations.
So, set an end time before starting a conversation with someone new, listen without interrupting or sharing your stories, and ask short, open-ended questions.
How to rely on text correctly
Your team may rely on tools like Skype, Sqwiggle, or Google Hangouts for video and voice chats to enable you to use the same rapport strategies we’ve just discussed. Voice and video calls can help you better interact with your team and avoid asynchronous communication issues such as time delays or misunderstandings.
But you will most likely spend a lot of time communicating via text messages. Whether it’s Slack , HipChat , Campfire shared documents, emails, or GitHub issues, text is the most convenient way to keep in touch with your teammates without distracting them.
Effective written communication is such an important part of telecommuting that it is often part of what telecommuting companies look for when hiring. For example, here’s what Buffer COO Leo Widrich says about hiring :
The main way we try to measure the fit with the corporate culture in practice is to look at the wording of each email and see how it fits with our culture. Moreover, we are a remote team, written communication takes on a lot of weight, and it is important for us to evaluate emotions.
In a remote setting, you should be able to communicate your point of view clearly and simply, show empathy and understanding, and be effective so as not to waste time as you may be waiting for a response from your team in different time zones anyway.
Here are three suggestions for communicating with remote team members using text:
1. Be in the know
When your teammates are working on the other side of the world, you get used to waking up or returning from lunch to a crowded inbox and messages from your team chat, shared documents, and various other places. It can be overwhelming, so finding ways to stay on top of what’s going on is absolutely essential in order to communicate effectively with each other.
Stripe’s distributed team shares most of the internal emails , which means everyone has a very full inbox for their day to day work. The company has over 428 email lists, so Stripe has a lot to organize. Last December, the team shared their transparent email scaling tools .
One of Stripe’s approaches is to create archive lists where copies of irrelevant emails are sent. This means that if you make an appointment with someone, you do not have to fill up all the inboxes with your return and return emails, but later everyone will have access to this information if they need it. Stripe CTO Greg Brockman explains it this way:
The goal is not to share things that would otherwise be secret: it is to uncover vast amounts of information that would otherwise be accidentally locked in multiple people’s mailboxes. In general, if you are discussing the inclusion of a list of archives, you should enable it.
Buffer also uses a transparent email process. You can read about how this works on the Buffer Open blog . Like many other teams, Zapier uses Slack for team and individual chats. Zapier team member Jason Kotenko has come up with a clever way to stay on top of everything that happens on the various Slack channels.
He created an empty channel where no discussion takes place. This channel serves as a placeholder for team members who have stepped away from their computer for a break. When they return, each active channel is bookmarked where they left so they can easily catch up on the discussions they missed.
2. Use emoticons and gifs.
I’ve never been a huge fan of emojis or emoticons. I use them sparingly compared to many people, and I always thought they seemed childish or unprofessional. However, I recently read something that changed my mind.
I read the opinion of a person who explained that they got down to using emoticons in emails. How else, she asked, can you fill written communication with emotions and nuances that are lacking due to the fact that you cannot see and hear each other? I thought this was a great moment.
GIFs probably fall into this category too. In my experience, HipChat and Slack channels tend to lend themselves to heavy use of GIFs, and while I’ve never really figured it out myself, it can serve this all-important purpose of adding color, tone, and emotion to your communication.
3. Remember Hanlon’s razor.
A razor is a concept used in philosophy to help us discard possible explanations (hence the name) for a phenomenon. Hanlon’s Razor refers to the idea that we must always assume ignorance over evil. That is, if someone does something wrong, do not assume that they intentionally wanted to harm you. It is also likely (and perhaps even more) that they simply made a mistake.
This is especially important in situations where you are lacking in context. If you are texting with coworkers who are in multiple time zones, try to always assume ignorance before malice if you have a misunderstanding.
In my own experience, this has happened several times. When I worked remotely at Buffer, I would often rush to Leo’s phone call to discuss things that we disagreed about, only to realize that we weren’t on the same page at all, and it was all a misunderstanding.
Make a statement when you need it
Perhaps the hardest but most obvious way to compensate for the lack of context in remote communication is to be more open and open than usual. As I mentioned in my example earlier, working with someone in the office makes it easier to understand their mood and understand when they need to be alone. When you work remotely, you will pester people by chatting with them when they are not in the mood – this is inevitable. Respecting others is harder when you have less information to make decisions.
To reduce this problem, we need to find ways to explicitly share this context with each other. A good way to do this is to set the rules in advance.
Here’s an example from my own experience: Co-founder Josh Sharp and I use Viber to communicate throughout the day. Sometimes it’s a quick message about having lunch or going to a meeting. Other times, we chat for hours in real time about our work. Since Viber is our “always on” channel for communication, we must explicitly exclude ourselves from the list if we need continuous working hours. So that no one would be offended by the disappointed request to shut up for a while, we came up with a code word.
Tree time is what we call continuous running time. I don’t remember where the name came from, but I think it had something to do with a hypothetical scenario where one of us runs up a tree to get away from the other … However, now it is our code word. If one of us asks the other to “spend time in the tree,” it means “don’t be offended, but I find it difficult to concentrate, and I really need some time to continuously focus on what I am doing.”
Since we set this rule in advance, we both know this is an option. Every time we feel the need for peace and quiet while at work, we know that we can go back to normal times without explaining ourselves or worrying about hurting the other person because we don’t want to chat right now.
Being open about what you need can be very difficult. Most of us are not used to being so outspoken with our teammates. But keep in mind all the information you have about how you are feeling and your current needs that your teammates don’t have.
You must fill this gap so they can communicate with you in the best possible way.
We have done a lot today. From all the examples I’ve given, you can see that each company does remote work differently. The most important thing I’ve learned while working remotely is that every team and every member on that team needs to find the way that works best for them.
Experiment with different options to find what works best, but remember the most important lesson: find a way to share the context of your situation with your teammates. They need all the information you can give them in order to work with you in the best possible way.
3 Communication Strategies For Building Strong Relationships From A Distance | Zapier